After some digging in libffi, I found a comment in ChangeLog that says "Link openbsd programs with -lpthread". Looks interesting. Unfortunately, I haven't found any top-level configuration options in CFFI that specifies how libffi is linked. There is a file:

Awesome suggestions! I'm tinkering with the LD_PRELOAD tactic. Here's the skinny on this morning's activities:

I built a recent version of libffi from source and installed it locally. I suspect that OpenBSD's version from /usr/ports will work but the installed name is libffi.so.0.0 - quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/cffi_0.11.2/libffi/init.lisp expects a different name:

I haven't really looked into this error yet. Actually, there is a FreeBSD-9.2-RC4 installation DVD sitting in the drive of my OpenBSD development machine; it's just waiting for a reboot. I went through the SBCL build process on OpenBSD last night. It wouldn't run many of the regression tests and seemed to fail some of those it did run. It would be nice to see SBCL build on OpenBSD with the --fancy options and pass all of the regression tests. Working toward that goal might be an interesting way to learn and explore. Although, pressing the reset button and getting on with it would also be fairly gratifying.